Sunday, June 27th (Day 2)

11:20 AM
Our bus that'll take us to the beginning of our trail will be here at one o'clock this afternoon. My pack is all ready to go, and it weighs forty-nine pounds with all of my crew gear, water, and everything else. It's been threatening rain since we've gotten here, but so far, we've only felt a few drops. These mountain storms are weird; they come and go so fast, and you can see them raining off in the distance. Our last lunch in the mess hall was sloppy joes, veggies, and fries. From now on, it'll be dehydrated anything. And I'm lookin' forward to it!

I regret saying that...

7:41 PM
Never mind on the no rain thing... it started sprinkling a few minutes before the bus arrived, and kept raining lightly for less than an hour or so. It took us a while, but we're now camped at Rayado River. We learned today how important and useful it is to take a good long look at the camp map... we had to trek back to the map to find out where the bear cable was. We set up our "Bearmuda Triangle", pitched our tents, and cooked dinner (BBQ sauce with Beef, NOT Beef with BBQ sauce). Overall, I feel good about today. Tomorrow we hike over Uraca Mesa.

Eventually, we learned to take a picture of the map with one of the digital cameras some of the other guys brought, and that kinda helped (it was a really small picture, though...). At each backcountry camp, there are several individual campsites, and we had trouble finding an open one. Sometimes they're hard to see tucked back in the woods. Also, we went carefully in regards to navigating on the first day... getting lost immediately wouldn't have been a good start!